Yes, 52,900 is the number of feet in ten miles plus an extra hundred feet. Actually, that hundred feet isn't really extra. It's necessary. Without it, you'd never be able to get to twenty miles, or fifty miles, or a hundred miles. If you've ever traveled any of those distances, you've passed through 52,900 feet and probably weren't even aware of it. But if you hadn't, you'd be stuck at 52,899.99999... feet forever. It's a very important number.

Hi, Mom! Why is "Rover" such a common name for dogs in anecdotes? Have you ever known anyone who actually named a dog "Rover"? And why would anyone outside of a goatherd or something want a dog to rove? I want my dog to stay at home. Roving is a big no-no. Roving equals harassing the neighbor's cattle and getting kicked or gored. Roving equals being mistaken for a deer by some trigger-happy idiot in spite of that neon orange collar. I'd rather name my dog "Stay Put".

Dog names any longer than one syllable are inane. Hell's bell, name him "Kill" if you must because you are bereft of any modicum of originality. Fuck me (which is too long a name for a God).

Meanwhile, back on the bungalow. Ted Currie showed up for my wood stove for $75. It's one a them Swedish wood stoves what come apart. I said he needed someone to help him get it out of the basement and what happened next was, well, I let him do it by himself against all common sense. I still have elevated blood pressure. What a fuckin mess! Damaged storm door and all. Destroyed door mat. Now, I of younger age would have made the fucker pay either today or in the middle of the night but my health and mental health preclude such. I will just clean it up and be glad he and the stove are gone.

But... I really shoulda keyed his van as he was leaving because that's what the fucker did to me. And he was nasty about it AFTER he got the stove in his van. People can be such assholes!

I did get $20 for a couch and chair later. Well, I had the $20 but buddy said to his buddy, "I can sew that rip on the couch cushion. The wife will freak out when she sees these in the living room!" So, I gave him back the $20 when he was leaving and he said, "Thank you, sir." $20 for "Sir" these days is fuckin cheap!

Mom! Did you know that the actual name for the symbol "#" is "octothorpe"? It's not "pound sign" or "hash symbol" or even "number sign". It's friggin' "octothorpe"! We've been lied to by millions of computers who tell us to "Press the pound sign." No wonder it always take me about half a second to remember what symbol they're talking about! They're calling it the wrong thing!

I'm patiently waiting for the day when my bank's computer will instruct me to "Enter your telephone banking PIN, followed by octothorpe."

Oh, once I had an octothorp Who was a friend to me I fed the thing on gruel and gorp Under the banyan tree It made him hop and snuff and snort And whirl and leap around Until my poor old octothorp Turned into a lowly pound! His hash was settled once for all His hair fell out behind. I weep that the octothorp should fall To the status of a sign!

He's working in the Never Sweat at the 1,235 foot level. Started as a mucker in a stope but worked his way up to mule wrangler in only a couple of weeks. He was a bar tender at the Finlandia but when he was told to "tap 'er light" he underfilled the beer mugs and barely escaped to the Dumas with his life. Leaving the Dumas was a tricky business, but as long as you left all that you owned and more there they let you keep your pants, or so I've heard anyway. So he's here and learning Irish except that he's in the very, very advanced group and he's got his Irish up. He told me to tell you that you owe him USD 1,237 from some mining stock you sold him, saying something about a mine being "a hole in the ground with a liar on top" but I didn't quite catch it all.

As the owner of two polysyllabic pooches, I must defend the practice of giving nice names to dogs, more than just a grunt in their direction. The third dog has a mono-syllable name, and came already named enough so I couldn't start calling him something else (though the name I had in mind is close enough sounding that he might not notice - it doesn't matter what I call him as long as I call him in time for dinner, right?)

I can't believe I'm below the line (or is it below the belt?) And I surely can't keep up with you creative funny guys.

I cannot tell a lie. My sirname does not begin with an "O" but rather a lowly and slender "I". And I am taking Irish, and in the so-called advanced class, where we are daily learning how much more complex the Irish language is than we'd ever imagined it could possibly be in our most demented nightmares.

I was embarrassed the other day to discover that I'd been talking to Rapparee for over an hour before he laid down enough clues for me to figure out who he was. And no, I've never worked in the Neversweat. It's all a myth and maybe even a conspiracy out to besmirch my sterling reputation.

Anyway, greetings to all of you out there in Mudland. I'm hoping I can make it to the Getaway this year and see some of you in person.

I was speaking (writing)about David Oglethorpe, notorious do-badder in Butte from 1871 to 1927. HE was also the guy who lit the fuses for the dynamite that blew up the union hall, HE was the guy behind the Frank Little incident, HE was guy who caused at least six of the mine "disasters" in Butte. He was Henry Plummer's boss and was called "The Mastermind of the Mines." Although he worked hand-in-glove with Clark, Daly, Heinze, and Standard Oil. He mysteriously vanished in 1927 while standing under an ore chute.

Congratulations, David, for having posted to the Mother of All BS Threads! Your official MOAB membership packet is in the mail.

Subject to availability, you will receive:

A framed certificate of MOABicity Sheet music to the official MOAB fight song A secret MOAB decoder ring A genuine MOAB whoopee cushion A packet of MOAB non-GMO-certified sea monkeys (just add water) An official MOAB bullshit detector (batteries not included, some assembly required)

I've ad me windaws open fer tree days b'y! Never ad da AC on once an she's July 25! Some shockin good me zon, me zon! Down ta yer 12C tanoight! Buddy... she don't get no better'n dis eh wha? I jus fear sumpin's gotta give come yer moon phase eh wha? I mean, wit all da heat out west an yer L Neenyo what dey say is gonna fry da fuck outta tings even worse, be da lard tunderin Jaysus, we might be in fer a big shit down in the Merrytimes too eh wha? So, I am enjoyin every single minute of dis grand wedder while she's ona go. When I can sleep with da windaws open an have ta use a BLANKET in July? Why, dat's heaven buddy.

I dropped a couple of Rapparree's posts into that thing and the needle didn't even quiver. This demonstrates to a certainty that his BS is surreptitious, covert, BS of the stealth variety, the kind that inserts itself into your mental landscape so underhandedly that you don't notice it corroding your thought patterns and undermining your ratiocinative processes. Polished, seemingly normal prose with a quiet, deadly, secret payload.

"[Fania] Pascal's Wittgenstein intends to accuse her of not of lying but of misrepresentation of another sort. She characterizes her feeling as the feeling of a run over dog. She is not really acquainted, however, with the feeling to which this phrase refers. Of course, the p0hrase is far from being complete nonsense to here; she is hardly speaking gibberish. What she says has an intelligible connotation, which she certainly understands. Moreover, she does know something about the quality of the feeling to which the phrase refers: she knows at least that it is an undesirable and unenjoyable feeling. The trouble with her statement is that it purports to convey something more than simply that she feels bad. Her characterization of her feeling is too specific; it is excessively particular. Hers is not just any bad feeling but, according to her account, the distinctive kind of bad feeling that a dog has when it is run over. To the Wittgenstein in Pascal's story, judging from his response, this is just bullshit." --Harry G. Frankfort, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 28-29.

Based upon this passage by Frankfort I hardly think it plausible to assume that the last post by Amos enjoys any plausibility or veracity whatsoever.

I had eggs over easy on cracked wheat toast for supper at 6PM. It's 23:45 and my farts already smell like eggs. I know this is not erudite or literary but it is the human condition and we share that fate... that fart. It's the fart that binds. Gramma was a Pascal... maybe I got my digestion from her?

What!!!??? You don't have a 3-D food printer? It's basic to every modern household! Are you living in a cave or what? If it's the cost, I'll give you the twenty bucks or so you need to get a real top-of-line one.

Last night I slept with the windows open and the ceiling fan on -- it got down to 58F (14.44C) and it was great, all snuggled up in blankets. I think I'll do it until I leave for France and Germany on the 3rd.

I'm not sure I understand this whole thing about having the windows open. Why is that unusual? Mine are open by default, except in the office where the balmy breezes tend to disrupt the stacks of papers. Every month of the year. What's the BFD? How about your toilet lids. Are they normally open? Normally closed? Oh, and your kitchen cabinets? Chimney flus? SIlverware drawers? Working peanut butter jars?

Soooo... I went out to meet the garbage truck driver. I told him I had a large bag of wood stove ashes and wondered how it should be bagged/disposed. He told me they can't take wood stove ashes because they could start a fire in the truck. I said, "Thanks, bud." and gave him a thumbs up. I shall put small amounts in the green bags (wet) over the next several weeks. No sense trying to explain to someone that ashes cannot burn.

Amos, we keep the windows open to allow fresh mountain air to permeate our house. I can understand why in your polluted, smog-smothered, Southern California environment you do not. But please, we wouldn't want to lose you so if you start coughing up blood and fragments of lung tissue (common in your area, I understand) please see a doctor right away.

Hot ashes? Have I got a job for you! Salary, benefits and all you can eat! Acourse, ya might have ta fight off the odd seagull or crow or stray cat fer yer snacks. Now, I know coons can be nasty critters but we don't got no coons in our garbage... and we won't because if them bandits get in my garbage, the City will take care of them or *I* will. And I don't relocate further than a green bag at roadside on garbage day.

Shhhhh! There are some animal lovers, even wild animal rescuers in the mudcat family. They don't want to hear about your thinning the herd and green bags.

I have concluded the activities of my long weekend and though it might sound like I'm proud to have cleaned the kitchen and taken out the trash, what I have really done is dog-proofed the house for the rest of my work week. Labrador retriever-proofed the house. This dog has no shame, is a counter-surfer extraordinaire. I won't enumerate all of the odd things as well as tasty things he has snatched and eaten, take my word for it that it is his nature to do so. It's so hot right now that I've rigged a dog door into the house so they don't have to move from shady spot to shady spot with frequent dips in their stock tank to stay cool. (No way I'm leaving this pack in the house all day long without a way out into the yard as needed. They're outside dogs, not record-holders in the bladder and bowel competition.) As soon as I put in that dog door they became instant couch potatoes. Except when they're out in the back yard barking at the black vulture that has been hanging out on the next door ham radio antenna.

If you have an ambition to be humorous, keep plugging. It is not accomplished by taking what someone said and just pretending they said the opposite--that's just, well, juvenile. You need to outgrow jejune contrarianism and discover the subtlety of genuine nuance if you ever expect to be, someday, genuinely funny.

You are correct, Amos, and I accept your criticism wholeheartedly. For even though my old friend Sam Clemens wrote

Who write the dramatic critiques for the second-rate papers? Why, a parcel of promoted shoemakers and apprentice apothecaries, who know just as much about good acting as I do about good farming and no more. Who review the books? People who never wrote one. Who do up the heavy leaders on finance? Parties who have had the largest opportunities for knowing nothing about it. Who criticise the Indian campaigns? Gentlemen who do not know a war-whoop from a wigwam, and who never have had to run a foot race with a tomahawk, or pluck arrows out of the several members of their families to build the evening camp-fire with. Who write the temperance appeals, and clamor about the flowing bowl? Folks who will never draw another sober breath till they do it in the grave.

I cannot fault what you said. Sam also wrote "Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place" because "Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand."

But I shall in the future endeavor to live by your wise precepts. Nuanced shall I be, nuances upon nuances shall flounder about in my writings. For though I admit to being the scion of a long tradition in American writing I shall eschew ad Califoriem remarks and limit myself to (probably vain) attempts to copy such wit as that of Pope, Swift, and Dryden.

It takes six City of Moncton employees and six waste collection vehicles to collect the solid waste for the entire city, which equals more than 17,000 metric tons each year. This is an average of 65 metric tons per collection night, and 10 metric tons—the equivalent of two elephants— per collection employee!

African, Bornean or Indian? Share when you know the answer... no spoilers.